Suchergebnisse

This assemblage is based on the talk I gave at the EASST010 conference in Trento, Italy, September 03, 2010. It is composed of several kinds of materials. The ground structure is formed by the slides I showed at that occasion. These slides are commented in three different ways. Firstly by excerpts from the talk, secondly by comments added now when this assemblage is put together, and finally quotes from "Design Things", the book manuscript around which the talk circulated

This paper discusses the design of things. This is done in an attempt to conceptually explore some of the political and practical challenges to participatory design today. Which things, and which participants? The perspective is strategic and conceptual. Two approaches are in focus, participatory design (designing for use before use) and meta-design (designing for design after design). With this framing the challenge for professional design to participate in public controversial things is considered.

This paper discusses the design of things. This is done in an attempt to conceptually explore some of the political and practical challenges to participatory design today. Which things, and which participants? The perspective is strategic and conceptual. Two approaches are in focus, participatory design (designing for use before use) and meta-design (designing for design after design). With this framing the challenge for professional design to participate in public controversial things is considered.Full text at ACM

This thesis is an inquiry into the human activity of designing computer artifacts that are useful to people in their daily activity at work. The emphasis is on opportunities and constraints for industrial democracy and quality of work. First, the philosophical foundation of design of computer artifacts is con­sidered. The need for a more fundamental understanding of design than the one offered by rationalistic systems thinking is argued. The alternative design philosophy suggested is based on pragmatic interpretations of the philosophies of existential phenomenology, emancipatory practice, and or­dinary language. Design is seen as a concerned social and creative activity founded in our traditions, but aiming at transcending them by anticipation and construction of alternative futures. Second, it is argued that the existing disciplinary boundaries between natural sciences, social sciences and humanities are dysfunctional for the subject matter of designing computer artifacts. An alternative under­standing of the subject matter and a curriculum for its study is discussed. The alternative emphasizes social systems design methods, a new theoreti­cal foundation of design, and the new potential for design in the use of prototyping software and hardware. The alternative also emphasizes the need to learn from other more mature design disciplines such as architec­tural design. Towards this background, and based on the practical research in two projects (DEMOS and UTOPIA), a view on work-oriented design of computer artifacts is presented. This concerns, thirdly, the collective resource approach to design of com­puter artifacts - an attempt to widen the design process to also include trade union activities, and the explicit goal of industrial democracy in design and use. It is argued that a participative approach to the design process is not sufficient in the context of democratization. However, it is suggested that it is technically possible to design computer artifacts based on criteria such as skill and democracy at work, and a trade union investigation and negotia­tion strategy is argued for as a democratic and workable complement to traditional design activities. Finally, a tŒil perspective - the ideal of skilled workers and designers in coopération designing computer artifacts as tools for skilled work is consid­ered. It is concluded that computer artifacts can be designed with the ideal of c rail tools for a specific profession, utilizing interactive hardware devices and the computer's capacity for symbol manipulation to create this resemblance, and that a tool perspective, used with care, can be a useful design ideal. However, the ideological use of a tool metaphor is also taken into account, as is the instrumental blindness a tool perspective may create towards the importance of social interaction competence at work. ; digitalisering@umu

Is and should there be a place for the Aristotelian virtue of phronesis in contemporary participatory design practice and for design as an act of anxious love? In this paper we take a critical look at participatory design and reflect upon the virtues of the collective designer. Towards a background of the dreams and lost utopias of some related collective designers of the past: the Bauhaus, Nordic design and Scandinavian collective systems design, we suggest that our attention should not be on the great espoused design ideals but on the politics-in-practice of the collective designer. The really interesting collective designer in practice might very well be much more of a "machiavellian" reflective practitioner than an objective scientist or politically correct utopist.

Participatory design has become increasingly engaged in public spheres and everyday life and is no longer solely concerned with the workplace. This is not only a shift from work oriented productive activities to leisure and pleasurable engagements, but also a new milieu for production and innovation and entails a reorientation from "democracy at work" to "democratic innovation". What democratic innovation entails is currently defined by management and innovation research, which claims that innovation has been democratized through easy access to production tools and lead-users as the new experts driving innovation. We sketch an alternative "democratizing innovation" practice more in line with the original visions of participatory design based on our experience of running Malm? Living Labs - an open innovation milieu where new constellations, issues and ideas evolve from bottom-up long-term collaborations amongst diverse stakeholders. Two cases and controversial matters of concern are discussed. The fruitfulness of the concepts "Things" (as opposed to objects), "infrastructuring" (as opposed to projects) and "agonistic public spaces" (as opposed to consensual decision-making) are explored in relation to participatory innovation practices and democracy.Full text at ACM

Designers and design researchers are increasingly exploring societal challenges through engagements with issues that call forward new publics and new modes of democratic citizenship. Whatever this is called design activism, social design, adversarial design, participatory design or something else we here see design engagements which are both controversial in their commitment to agendas of social change and experimental in the sense that they openly probe for what can possibly be enacted. In this conversation we want to explore how such engagements may be seen as democratic design experiments that form a third space of re-presentation and emergent civic action between laboratory and parliament.